Posts by linger
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Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to Russell Brown,
>Data are plural (that’s what a good education does for you :) )
I think I actually knowingly committed that sin in the post.
No sin: in modern English, data is commonly (and IMHO correctly) used as a mass noun. As such, it fits into the pattern of many other words in the same semantic field, e.g. information .
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I do remember some degree of "teaching to the test", especially for Scholarship exams -- though, fortunately, this was not merely in terms of learning facts, but (mostly) in developing strategies for thinking about problems -- which my teachers recognised as the best preparation for the range of possible test questions.
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Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to Scott Chris,
If you're going to trust Wikipedia to define basic concepts without bias, care to have a look at philosophy of education ? Its scope is rather broader than you present it as.
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Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to Scott Chris,
Apart from the tone, what Tom was saying is the same as what I said, i.e. :
if you really think evaluation should be the number one priority of education, you’re ignoring a lot of what education is trying to do. -
Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to Scott Chris,
compatible with
… but does not entail!
my philosophy of education which is, in a nutshell, setting clear educational aims and expectations and measuring the level of attainment relative to those stated aims and expectations. Makes assessment and evaluation of performance so much easier on a broad scale as well as an individual scale.
As Tom says, this is not a philosophy of education, but a philosophy of management into which the word “educational” has been shoehorned.
“Education”, as a social institution, has several (partly conflicting, partly competing) aims. We’ll all have our own ideas about what the relative priorities of these should be – and almost certainly, different levels of education must have different priorities – but we should at least recognise that they exist.
They include at least the following:(i) socialisation to fit at least the minimal norms of behaviour necessary for social cohesion;
(ii) delivery of information about the world;
(iii) development of skills;
(iv) increasing potential for success in life (which should be read as including, not merely “employability”, but enjoyment, thus including the identification and encouragement of students’ own interests);
(v) evaluation – as a way of measuring students’ levels and abilities in order to assess appropriate further instruction; and as a way of measuring and improving the outcome of the education process.To the extent that these compete for time and resources, evaluation cannot be allowed to trump all other aims. And, if different types of education have different priorities among these aims, then it is not possible to apply one standard management solution across the board.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to dc_red,
invest our resources smarter
Particularly facepalmy if this is supposed to divert attention from National’s asset sales, which would be a prime example of “investing our resources = dumber”.
Combine that with the environmental trashing
and the beneficiary bashing
and the educational slashing
and there's a consistent pattern:It's all part of National's stupid economy drive:
i.e., a drive to create a stupid economy.Hence, a punctuation change -- "It's the economy: Stupid!"
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Islander,
The little I've seen of Japanese elementary schools suggests that some parts of the curriculum (especially natural science) are quite hands-on, but many activities are strictly off-limits (including anything with the remotest potential to be dangerous, e.g. anything involving the use of sharp objects).
One of the areas of "declining skill" so often bemoaned here is in elementary students' manual dexterity & coordination (e.g. in one test, ability to sharpen a pencil using a knife: few Japanese 7-year-olds can do this, possibly because they're not allowed to use knives)."Oral learning" ... more generally, rote learning ... is stressed. (And that is the right word.)
By 2006, most public elementary schools had introduced some English lessons (at the urging of parents, rather than the Ministry of Education) ... but even for 6th graders, who had the most exposure, this amounted to only 15 hours over the year. At elementary level English lessons are limited to basic greetings and short songs. There's a lot of repetition. Students never get to use the language to express themselves meaningfully. (One former Education minister [Kosaka] explicitly gave the aim at this level as developing enjoyment of English and/or foreign culture, not necessarily to allow any communication.)
Within the Ministry-mandated curriculum at higher levels, there's even less chance for students to use the language (at all, let alone in any playful or creative way). School textbooks are notoriously geared to entrance exams, with understanding provided by meticulous translation notes rather than by discovery or creativity. A ministry survey in 2005 found only 4% of public middle schools, and 25% of high schools, conducted most of their English lessons — even oral communication lessons! — in English.
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Although they’re starting to relax things a little.
Well, not exactly…
True, there is now much less competition for university places in Japan.
It is also true that – partly as a result of the demographic shift – the standards of students accepted into university (and that’s any given Japanese university, even at the highest levels) are much lower than they were 10 years ago. A depressingly high proportion of the intake of “English majors” for my own department now score at worse than random guessing on TOEIC – something unthinkable even 5 years ago. Other basic skills (time management, critical thinking, maths, you name it) have shown a similar steep decline. Takamitsu Sawa (president of Shiga University) has observed:When a university appears to fail to attract a sufficient number of students, it tends to admit all applicants and, if necessary, enroll additional applicants from China.
, resulting in a basic problem
in the lack of students’ eagerness and ability to study
[…]
A large number of students majoring in the liberal arts do not possess sufficient skills to read, write and express themselves while many science majors cannot keep up with their math classes.
["More crucial than English”, Japan Times, Monday, Jan. 23, 2012]
Eventually there will be some kind of Darwinian shakeup and the third of universities currently unable to attract enough students to run sustainably will be forced to close, to some extent reinstating the previous level of competition – though it could take more than a decade for that process to run its course.
But meanwhile, there is now much more competition in the job market, so that our students are now spending most of their final two years at university job-hunting. And their lower skill levels (across the board, not just in English) are not serving them well in that regard. (Last year less than 60% of Japanese university graduates found jobs. I hasten to add, that's the national average. My own university did somewhat better.)
As a result of this trend, the past decade’s experiment in “relaxed education” (in which Saturday classes were removed, and class hours progressively reduced, at high schools) has been deemed a failure, and – starting in 2009 under Abe – class hours have gradually been expanded again.
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Chris Waugh,
And then there’s Japan. Cartoon by Roger Dahl, Japan Times 24th June 2012.
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Women’s mags: inconceivably superficial?
